Republicans Without A Plan

There's a thing on Twitter about #WAP that's not exactly safe for work but it's out there and well-known.

What's also out there now is another WAP and this abbreviation stands for Without A Plan because that's where the modern Republican Party has led itself (via Annie Lowry at the Atlantic):

The GOP in general is remarkably quiet on how it would govern and what it seeks to accomplish in the coming years. Breaking with precedent, the party decided against producing an original platform for the 2020 convention. (Put differently: It no-platformed itself.) And Republican leadership has gone dark on a huge swath of issues: balancing the budget, reforming entitlement programs, tackling climate change, improving public education, reducing student-loan debt, and ameliorating racial inequalities—as well as getting the country through the pandemic and out of the recession.

With the planet burning, the virus killing, the economy collapsing, and millions of Americans preparing to vote, the country’s leading political cabal has moved into a queasy post-policy space: Its aperture has narrowed to just a few issues; its desire to try to pass major, proactive legislation has withered. This is not just proof that a man as interested in his own image as he is uninterested in briefing books should not be president. It is also a sign that American democracy is in peril...

What the Republicans did was posit a party platform that was copied and pasted from the 2016 agenda, and edited most everything out except for a new paragraph: RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda. Without clarifying exactly what trump's agenda really means.

Basically, the Republican Party is saying "We're gonna do whatever Our Lord and False Idol donald trump tells us what to do."

This is both refreshing and horrifying. Refreshing in that at least the Republicans have stopped pretending outright that they care about issues. Horrifying in that they're demonstrating they care only about appeasing a despotic wannabe who lusts after the money and the power.

Also horrifying is the implication that the Republican voting base is not expecting anything more out of the party leadership than the ongoing pandering to their partisan identity... and worse, pandering to the fears and racism that trump offers them in lieu of effective policies. Back to Lowry:

For the many Republicans who don’t benefit much from tax cuts, and never received the promised populist policies, identity politics and racial resentment are strong enough forces to tie them to the party. A study by the political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, for instance, showed that Trump’s dog-whistling worked. In 2000, George W. Bush won two in three working-class white voters who evince considerable racial resentment, measured by asking them whether or not they agree with statements such as “If Blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Trump got nine in 10 of them.

Trump electrifies the party’s broader base with revanchism, nativism, and white nationalism, catering to the anxieties of a historically hyper-dominant group fast becoming a minority. Just take a look at who is speaking at the GOP convention to see what red meat looks like for red America: the couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis and Nick Sandmann of Covington Catholic High School, whose interaction with the Native American activist Nathan Phillips in front of the Lincoln Memorial went viral in 2019. Or, in the absence of a national 2020 manifesto, take a look at the Texas platform: Delegates picked top priorities including banning gender-confirmation procedures, protecting monuments, purging the voter rolls, and preventing teenagers from getting abortions or obtaining birth control without parental consent, all potent fronts in the culture war. “Policy doesn’t matter much” to winnable conservative voters, Brent Buchanan, a Republican pollster, told me. “It’s more about personalities and principles.”

This is, in many regards, the final victory of Roger Ailes and Harry Treleaven, campaign handlers for Richard Nixon back in 1968. If you read The Selling of the President, which chronicled the rise of television-based marketing of elections, you might remember the breakthrough Treleaven developed regarding the electoral process. It's not about the issues - although they matter - it's about the emotional appeal a candidate or party offers to potential voters. Lemme quote:

It was Treleaven, working on a 1966 Congressional campaign in Texas for this businessman named George HW Bush, who noted that "logical persuasion" was difficult to sell because he found "probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." (p.45)  He found that image worked wonders, as long as he presented Bush as likable, hard-working, and expressing empathy for the voter...

The issues may be things that a party can rally around, but the driving force behind voter interest and voter turnout are the emotional and irrational appeals to that interest. The Beltway pundits may demand the candidates talk about "the issues" but when you watch and read how they cover the campaigns they almost always discuss non-issues about the candidates that cover personalities, follies, and worse.

When I look back at the Presidential campaigns I've witnessed, I've noticed the issues only mattered to a point: What mattered to the voters seemed to be the beliefs - based a lot on gut feelings - of which candidate appealed on an emotional level. It mattered if the voters had an irrational perception of the candidate, not the rational. A rational voter base would have swarmed to Hillary due to her experience and stances on issues that did resonate with Americans... but she couldn't achieve a majority vote because of the irrational fearmongering that had followed her for decades. Biden isn't as strong a candidate on paper when it comes to the issues... but his public persona is so likable he could (and did) make a few gaffes and still see his popularity polls go upward.

So it makes some sense, to be fair, that the parties find ways to appeal to not only their own bases on an emotional level, but also as many Americans as possible. It's a lesson learned from the 1970s, and it all depends - like the Republicans in 1980 with Reagan, with the Democrats in 1992 with Clinton - if the gamble pays off.

The problem is that since 1992 when Bush the Elder was losing control of the coalition that won them the 1980s, the Republican Party decided to pursue emotional prodding not through empathy or likability - although they'd LOVE to have another Reagan to come along and seduce the masses again - but through demonization of the Other. It had been there with the dog whistles on race and abortion under Reagan, but when Bush signed off on battling Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad, it was like a dam bursting loose.

The Republican turn to mudslinging (also known as Swiftboating when it was Kerry they insulted in 2004) came at the same time the Republicans were losing ground with their actual agendas of gay-bashing, tax-cutting, deregulating, and more. The views of the voting base shifted from conservative to liberal, even as the Republicans clung harder to their tax-cut Utopia ways. By 2012, their own strategists were warning the party that the younger more Progressive voters were going to outnumber the older more Republican voters by 2024 (2028 at the latest) and that no amount of irrational campaigning was going to win them over.

Instead, the Republicans doubled down. They focused on suppressing the voters they can't control - minorities, women, college-age blocs - and allowed their more racist leanings - expressed with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor - to dominate their agenda in 2016.

That lead to trump winning.

And it lead to the Republicans realizing that, even as they race towards that demographic brick wall in 2024, this is the only way left for them to win.

It's not much of a plan: Stoke outrage and let Overlord trump reap the benefits.

The horrifying thing is if they can drive enough Americans insane to make it work again in 2020.

We dare not let them.

Four Nights of donnie's... Ugly Face

So now that we've endured the long week of a Democratic national convention - where we didn't see enough AOC or Julian Castro but watched a beautiful state-by-state roll call and witnessed Joe Biden use his best skill set (empathy) - we now have to endure the long week of the Republican party host their own convention to renominate trump and push their platform to a global audience.

It's not gonna be pretty (hat-tip to Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice):

Trump is micro-managing the shit out of the event because of course he is. He will go to his grave believing he’s a media genius because venal media types propped him up and wiped the racist drool off his chin so they could first sell a serially bankrupt fraud as a successful businessman on a reality TV show and then sell that same buffoon as a presidential candidate.

But the truth is, the network professionals aren’t running this shit-show, Trump is. And he scraped clean through the bottom of the barrel early in his administration, so the hires executing this event are decidedly of the lowest quality...

Betty then quotes from the NY Times:

Republicans involved in the planning admit that anxiety began to set in two weeks ago. But on Saturday, they said that they were now confident that a fully realized lineup was in place — and that in contrast to the Democrats’ virtual event, voters could expect something more akin to a regular convention, with a focus on live onstage moments featuring Mr. Trump, whom aides described as the week’s “talent in chief.”

Typically, the nominee makes a mundane appearance early in the convention — waving or watching from the wings — before a major speech at the end. Mr. Trump has dismissed that model and now plans to directly address the nation in prime-time on each of the convention’s four nights. The president wants the opportunity to rebut charges made against him throughout the Democratic program, aides said, particularly on his handling of the coronavirus crisis...

trump is basically hijacking the 10PM prime time pundit slots on the major cable networks - if not the regular networks (who I hope redecide to air Agents of SHIELD reruns instead) - to do his craven rally stump speeches for four straight nights.

This is unprecedented in the modern political convention era, if not ever. Most early - pre-Primary (1970s) - conventions didn't even have a confirmed nominee (even incumbents weren't safe back in the 1800s) until the final ballot of attendees, so nobody spoke all four nights. Once we got into the era where the nominee was set by March-June thanks to the state Primaries, it became custom for the convention week to promote up-and-coming fresh faces (like Bill Clinton in 1988 or Barack Obama in 2004) in the prime time slots to keep their future bright and shiny to motivate the party faithful.

Not this time. trump's ego is overriding party needs and he's going to be shilling himself four straight nights, both to keep his own energy up - like an emotion vampire, he thrives on the rage and sadism of his crowds - and to make sure the whole thing is about him him him.

Problem is, there's a good reason you want to keep your Presidential nominee to just one big night to give The Big Speech: You reduce the odds of your nominee laying a stinkbomb of an egg on national television. You'll notice the acceptance speeches of every candidate in the modern era is a rather boring, push-the-buttons, avoid-the-gaffes affair. And they only do it one night, hit-or-miss: But they've gotten the speech-making part down to a science, so it's usually a hit (even trump's ode to his own ego - "I alone can fix this" - hit all the right notes in an acceptance speech). trump is tempting fate here: he is multiplying the risks of a badly received speech by a factor of four.

And trump is threatening to use these four nights to rebut the Democratic party accusations of how trump has 1) mismanaged international affairs, 2) mismanaged the coronavirus response, 3) mismanaged the government, 4) mismanaged the economy. We are going to get a combination of gaslighting, lies, projection, and self-grievance on a scale rarely seen at an official party convention.

Going negative this early - and the odds of it happening have gone up now - on the national stage is a recipe for disaster. Yes, it will embolden the party base of Republican voters who are already wolfing down the rage and hate that trump's been selling them the last four years along with the rage and hate the GOP's been selling since 1992. But you run the serious risk of alienating the independent, still-on-the-fence voters who look for a broad sense of unity, national spirit, and call to empathy (and yes, these voters do exist). 

Reagan won big in 1980 (and even moreso in 1984) by making such broad appeals even when his actual agenda was more hardline conservative and harsh. It's why Biden and the Dems hosted this year's convention as a call to Big Tent unity with appeals to centrist Republicans (inviting John Kasich in an effective "Crossroads" presentation to bring those "Reagan Democrats" back) and lofty displays of families and teens calling for a better America.

trump's potential Four Nights of Airing Grievances is going to rub a lot of Americans the wrong way.

It's gonna look like the Rose Garden Melania just bulldozed into a grassy bikepath: flat and grey and MY GOD WHAT THE FCK DID THEY DO TO THE TREES.

The article title, by the by, is a reference to a Survival Horror game series called "Five Nights At Freddie's" which is mostly a set of jump scares you have to endure.

trump's Carnie show is going to be worse than that.

The best fcking move America can do is not watch this train wreck. Don't give trump and his cronies any viewing numbers to crow about. Look away. WALK AWAY. Run if you have to.

Just think of the Chernobyl supervisors who thought to themselves "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" Think of everything that can go wrong with a hasty, last-minute, what-the-hell-are-we-doing national spectacle micromanaged by the worst boss in modern history.

Just don't watch, people.

Even The Postperson Knows The GOP Is Committing Fraud

(Update 8/22/20: Thanks to Tengrain for adding this article to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Roundup! Please leave a comment (I know it's clunky but I got tired of the Chinese spam and I abhor anonymous trolls...))

Oh, to wake up this morning to the news about yet another Republican strategist/VIP getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Take it away, Southern District of New York!

Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Philip R. Bartlett, Inspector-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the United States Postal Inspection Service (“USPIS”), announced the unsealing of an indictment charging BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA for their roles in defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall” that raised more than $25 million.  The defendants were arrested this morning.  KOLFAGE will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Hope T. Cannon in the Northern District of Florida.  BANNON will be presented today in the Southern District of New York.  BADOLATO will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Wilson in the Middle District of Florida.  SHEA will be presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen L. Mix in the District of Colorado.  The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in the Southern District of New York.

Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said:  “As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction.  While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.  We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it.”

The USPIS? Oh yes, by the by the Postal Service DOES have its own police force! Considering they've been around since DAY ONE of the United States (actually they date back to 1772 before the Declaration of Independence!) created to deter mail theft or any fraudulent use of mail, they are the oldest law enforcement agency on the books. The Mail Cops can arrest people, and take them to court for anything ranging from pilfering boxes off of porches to committing financial fraud through mailed-in donations to fake non-profits.

And the kind of fraud these clowns were involved with triggered a lot of red alerts with the postal police:

Starting in approximately December 2018, BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA, and others, orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors, including donors in the Southern District of New York, in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as “We Build The Wall” that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States.  In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”

Those representations were false.  In truth, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.  In particular, KOLFAGE covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall, while BANNON, through a non-profit organization under his control (“Non-Profit-1”), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which BANNON used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in BANNON’s personal expenses.  To conceal the payments to KOLFAGE from We Build the Wall, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to KOLFAGE indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under SHEA’s control, among other avenues.  They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as KOLFAGE noted in a text message to BADOLATO, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential” and kept on a “need to know” basis...

Oh, and of course two of these crooks were Florida guys. Just to keep it crazy as usual.

A lot of this wouldn't have happened if trump had not been in the White House, abusing the office of the Presidency to push for a goddamned border wall to shill to his voting base to prove he was being tough against "those people" of the Dread OTHER.

It also is part of the ongoing reality that there's a lot of people who exist in trump's orbit - Paul Manafort, trump's lawyer Michael Cohen, a lot of players in the 2016 campaign tied into Russian sabotage of the elections - who keep getting caught committing felonies especially along the lines of bank fraud, tax fraud, other financial misdeeds, and now mail fraud.

That is the world trump comes from: Not a world of business but a world of con artists and thievery, surrounded by people who are driven to line their own pockets at the expense of everyone else.

We're talking about trump whose family Foundation had to shut down because it was violating a ton of regulations set in place to ensure not-for-profit entities would truly spend toward charities and public good.

And how can any of this be shocking to the Republicans STILL eager to support trump, while their own party routinely gets caught committing financial crimes at the state and federal level so often? There's a scandal in Ohio right now involving the Republican State Speaker caught in a bribery/kickback deal with a utility company that's ensnared so many of his own colleagues and is costing the state's residents in hiked fees and wasted tax dollars.

But what did you expect from a Republican Party that worships unregulated greed as a virtue?

Of course the Republicans - from the elected officials to the power brokers to the lobbyists all the way down the line - are going to get caught over and over again committing acts of fraud.

It's all profit even after they go to jail, when they come back out hailed as martyrs against the evil libruls, and they can get a rich book deal and continue popping up on Fox Not-News as part of the tour to raise even more money on questionable schemes to keep lining their pockets.

Because there's still enough Republican voters out there blinded by racism, sexism and pure hate who never care to learn how their "heroes" are ripping them off every donation, every hat sale, every book signing, every way to squeeze the money out of them until they're broke and dead.

That's how fraud thrives in this nation: The willingness of the victims to keep pouring more into the scam.

Even the Postal Service can't save them from themselves. I doubt God can. 

And the trumpian con job rolls on to the next ripoff.

Anniversary: The Vote Mattered Then, It Matters Now

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed this:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Before this, elections and thus political representation could only be done by men. Even though women counted in the Census towards the congressional apportionment, even as women came to own property and run businesses, even with women showing centuries worth of spilling the same blood, sweat, and tears as men.

The right to vote had long been a struggle even before the Constitution was made, with the feminists of the Revolutionary era calling for equal rights of women to vote and hold office. Even as the abolitionists were arguing for Blacks to be free, a good number of them also didn't see a reason to let women vote. The entitlement of patriarchy was pretty strong.

But the struggle grew, not just here but across much of the planet where any elective body existed. The suffrage movement was a universal one, and by the 1900s the Progressive reformers that had gained control of the United States policy making got around to getting the right to vote for women set in stone.

The struggle to get women elected into office took a while longer, with few winning their way into Congress well into the 1970s. Every so often there would be a wave of women candidates expanding the representation in office, but that wave would ebb and the number would never get to near-equal the number of men (in a planetary demographic where the male-female gender split is roughly half-and-half, it's a bit shocking to see we're STILL below a quarter of the Senate AND House of Representatives by 2020). 

What matters about voting is the power the voters have in choosing people who will enact laws and reforms that benefit their needs. In issues that matter most to women - equal pay at work, better social aid for family care, legal protections against harassment and rape and exploitation, equal access to higher education and career opportunities, better health care and the freedom of health care choices - they are not seeing enough women in leadership roles working to resolve those issues (and few male elected officials caring enough to resolve them as well).

Getting women to vote mattered in 1920 and earlier, getting women to vote matters today because there remains so much work left to be done to ensure equality and justice for all regardless of gender or race or orientation or faith.

It matters today because our overall right to vote is under attack more so than it has been since the 1960s, not just for minorities but for every demographic that is not Rich White Male.

A hundred years ago women won their power to vote in elections. This year, everyone needs to express that power to vote to stop the corruption of a vote-suppressing Republican Party before we - not just women but men - lose that power.

Get the damn vote out, America. Women as well as men.

Honest Bumper Stickers 2020: Could This Election Cycle Get ANY Crazier? ...Yes, It Can...

The Honest Bumper Stickers will take some time to reach a sizable number, but in the meanwhile I've got these created in the quick:

More are sure to follow.

How To Pronounce Kamala

With Harris now selected to be the Vice President for Joe Biden should they win this November, I have to admit to my eternal shame that I was pronouncing her first name wrong. I was going by Ka-Muhl-ah, my bad.

In light of all the SOBs on the Far Right coming out of the woodwork to reignite their Birther bullshit, I realized we need to confirm the proper pronunciation of her name so we can show our respect.

So here we go: This is how you pronounce "Kamala":

N-A-T-U-R-A-L   B-O-R-N   C-I-T-I-Z-E-N   O-F   T-H-E   F-O-O-K-I-N-G   UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Rhymes with AMERICA, you FOOKS.

Also, this:

Are we going to have to go through all that racist Birther shit again? Yes we are, because the fooking Republicans have no other way to rally their voters to them.

P.S. I may be mispronouncing fook. I blame Karl Tanner (Burn Gorman).

Anniversary: Woodstock from 2020

 Another year, another time to remember the Woodstock Festival of 1969.

And as always, a salute to Mr. Taggart, Hero of the Woodstock Festival.

trump Is Destroying the US Postal Service

The destruction of the United States Postal Service has been going on for the past few weeks - as trump's Acting Postmaster General DeJoy, yet another unqualified appointee who has personal financial conflicts of interest, has been eliminating services and sorting equipment - but today trump just... blurted it out (again), via Barbara Sprunt at NPR:

While President Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, falsely claiming it leads to rampant fraud, he appeared to confirm Thursday morning that he opposes Democrats' proposed boost in funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to make it harder to expand voting by mail.

Trump gave that explanation during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network after she asked why the White House and congressional Democrats are still miles apart on approving a new stimulus deal.

Trump said one major factor is the Democrats' push for an injection of funds into the U.S. Postal Service to expand voting by mail.

"They [the Democrats] want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent — that's election money basically," Trump said...

trump is going by a long-debunked claim that massive voter fraud happens, and that a lot of that fraud is through mail-in ballots. he's straight up lying, but it's the excuse he can use to suppress voter turnout any way he can for 2020.

In the process, trump and DeJoy are deliberately slowing down the sorting, sending and delivering of anything that's within the same rate service as the mail-in (also known as Absentee) ballots. Not only will that all get affected... but other essential shipments like medical supplies to ailing homebound, people in rural/long-distance places, and veterans are getting hit by this stunt. Medical supplies are getting delayed. Please raise your anger up a notch about that.

This is going to hurt more people than ever before... especially during a pandemic when in-person pickups are a serious risk.

trump's kneecapping of the Post Office is also part of an ongoing privatization push by Republicans to underfund if not abolish federal agencies and services they claim can be better done through the private sector... which by the by never works out. I digress, let's stick to this point.

Thing is, the Postal Service is one of the specific tasks spelled out in the bedrock foundation: The Constitution of the United States makes it clear in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: "Congress shall have power to...  To establish post offices and post roads..." with the implication that it is Congress' duty to ensure people can send and receive mail, that businesses can ship and receive parcels, that the communications vital to the strength of the nation never wavers nor slows.

trump is intentionally saying Fuck You to all of that.

And trump along with his lackey DeJoy are both breaking the law. Via Cornell's online US Code:

18 U.S. Code § 1703.Delay or destruction of mail or newspapers

(a)Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail entrusted to him or which shall come into his possession, and which was intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier or other employee of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or the Postal Service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

trump is bragging that he's delaying the mail.

We could note that technically trump is not a Postal Service employee, but he MAY be considered an officer: one of the hats of the Presidency Loser of the Popular Vote is head of the Executive branch which oversees the Post Office. This law should well apply to DeJoy who is directly employed as an officer - the fricking Acting Postmaster General! - and his ass needs to be called to the U.S. House committee in charge of making sure the agency is running well.

This is a serious problem. For all the technological wonders of the Intertubes, our nation still relies on physical mail for much of our personal and professional lives. trump is threatening all of that because he's desperately trying to steal an election he dare not lose.

Call your Congresscritter today. Try 202-224-3121 and tell them your District (if you don't have that at hand, your mailing ZIP code should do). Be polite, the person answering is likely an unpaid intern and deserves your sympathy as much as trump deserves your rage.

Get the big guns out. Start the investigations into this and force trump to put OUR Postal Service back together again.

It's not just our voting rights at stake, it's our very lives.

Official: It's Biden / Harris 2020

Word dropped this afternoon, all the speculation is done, all the fighting steps up a notch, and we finally have a WINNER!

It's DAN QUA- wait wrong Veep announcement.

It's KAMALA HARRIS!

As mentioned often before, the selection of the Vice President doesn't do much to improve - or worsen - a Presidential campaign as long as the pick is a sensible, solid one. It's a first test for the President: showing off his/her decision-making of who'll they also pick as Cabinet members, agency bosses, what have you. It underscores the direction and theme of the campaign as well: Picking someone with foreign policy cred is one thing, picking a Veep with economic reform ideas is another.

Biden picking Kamala Harris says four things:

1) He is looking at keeping a big tent going for the Democratic Party. Much of Harris' voting record is a solid Left history. Despite her image and reputation as a state Attorney General, her history as a U.S. Senator ranks her pretty high on the liberal scoring charts (govtrack ranks by "most conservative" so in liberal measurements Harris is at the other end). Biden is recognized as more Center than Left, so getting a solid Liberal Left candidate should appeal to many at that end of the spectrum (she's closer to Bernie Sanders than Elizabeth Warren).

2) He is showing no ill-will to the time in the debates when Kamala went after Biden for his school busing stance and other not-good positions early in his Senatorial career. Once Harris dropped out of the primaries, she eventually backed Biden for the ticket to show party fealty, and Biden as a long-time player had to respect that. There's also Biden's Passive-Positive traits of Congeniality and team-building: He has a world-view of bipartisan outreach, and repairing bridges to party leaders who opposed him fits that world-view. This is Biden's way of signaling to other factions in the Democratic Party (and any moderate factions left among Republicans) that he will have an Open Door of sorts to his Oval Office.

3) He is demonstrating to the Party and to the general voters that he keeps his word: Biden promised he would choose a woman as a Vice President and so he did.

4) He is living in his comfort zone. Not that he and Harris will see eye-to-eye on every issue, it's that Biden is one of those Senators who viewed his time in that setting as membership in an exclusive club. Senators tend to favor Senators as political allies even when they're disagreeing on issues (note how John McCain wanted fellow Senator Joe Lieberman as his Veep in 2008 even though Lieberman was a Democrat(!)). Biden had to be thinking "If Kamala was cool enough for the Senate she's cool enough for my campaign."

Voting, of course, still matters. Turnout remains key for Democrats to overcome the obstruction and suppression the Republicans are already signalling to the world. What today's decision does is move the campaign closer to cohesion and planning for the big run to November. It's a moment to stir up support and fundraising and momentum in the media (by the buzz on Twitter today, it seems to have done all three).

It also means I need to make more 2020 bumper stickers!

What If: Considering How trump Will Cheat in 2020

I wrote earlier that donald trump has no honest way to win the 2020 Presidential election.

So that means trump is going to cheat.

We're already seeing some of the steps trump is deploying to rig the turnout and thus the results. his latest Postmaster General is sabotaging the United States Postal Service to ensure mailing delays that could prevent mail-in ballots from getting received in time to count.

Other things in play, aside from trump's accusations that mail-in balloting is voter fraud, are AG William Barr's efforts to misdirect investigations into Russian (and other nations') meddling into the 2020 general vote. There's hints aplenty that Barr is setting up "October Surprises" to discourage voter turnout for Joe Biden. 

All of this culminates into a lot of worried speculation - and yes, I am piling onto that dread - of how trump and cronies are going to cause enough disruption into the results that he can shrug off a Popular Vote and also an Electoral College count that would otherwise confirm a Joe Biden victory. 

But can it really happen?

Infidel753 pointed me to a link to a website Electoral-Vote that took stock of all the fears and tried to look at the actual numbers and likely results for November 2020. What the blogger there found was, well here's a few paragraphs:

If we assume there is enough "fog" to give cover to state legislatures to start thinking about shenanigans, that still leaves the pro-Trump forces with some daunting math to confront. Let's start with the states that have Democratic trifectas. Joe Biden is expected to win all of these, and there are not going to be any EV-stealing shenanigans in Trump's favor in these places:

That already puts us (note: well, Biden) at 195 EVs. Now let's add in the states where Biden is expected to win, and the Democrats control at least one chamber of the state legislature (note: meaning the GOP can't automatically fck with the EV):

 

We're up to 233 EVs. Biden isn't going to lose any of these due to shenanigans, either. Note, incidentally, that Minnesota is the only one of the five additional states that has a split legislature. The four others have both chambers with Democratic control.

Now, let's add states where Biden is favored to win, and where there is at least one Democrat who has to sign off on the results (either the governor, the secretary of state, or both):

Now we are up to 305 EVs. Getting into the weeds of what could happen in each state is a bit much, but several things are already evident: (1) Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states would have to be very unified to pull off this scheme; (2) they would face pushback on that, including lawsuits, in many places; and (3) their likely best case scenario, even if they are unified and they prevail in court, is to deny anyone an electoral victory (by muddying the waters until the deadline for the EC to meet has passed) and to throw the election to the House...

So the good news, as long as the voter turnout matches what the polling is currently telling us, is that Biden can easily pass the 270 EV hurdle much like Obama did in 2008 and 2012. And the blogger at Electoral-Vote hasn't counted states like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia that can still go Blue for Biden this November.

So the bad news is this: Now we know why trump and his GOP cronies are eager to fck up ballot-by-mails (aka Absentee balloting) to try and mess with ALL states results to create enough chaos to ruin this math. And now we know why Barr is readying the DOJ to cause the chaos, not prevent it.

Going through a current pandemic crisis that can hamper in-person voter turnout is probably one of the reasons - he'll never admit it, but you have to admit the thought has crossed so many people's minds that SOMEBODY in trump's orbit whispered it into his ear - why trump is failing to respond to the crisis at all.

Another element of bad news is, while the Electoral-Vote blogger - I'm not sure whose name in on it, it's either Votemaster or Zenger (hmm, as a Journalism grad I know that name) - knows the Popular vote AND Electoral vote all favor Biden, we can still see that trump and the GOP's endgame is to throw the chaos into the U.S. House. The example here isn't the 2000 Election madness - the conditions for that were different - but the 1800 and 1876 Elections, where political bias favored the Party in control of the House.

The sick rule of the House solution is that the votes are not tallied by Representative - which favors Democrats - but by State Delegation (the group per state) meaning 50 votes not 435 (and DC has not vote in this matter). Thanks to gerrymandering, delegations skew to the Republicans who currently control 26 delegations over Democrats' 23 (one delegation is split). THIS is what worries Never Trumpers, more so that messing with the Electoral College: Barr could either trick or bully enough state legislatures to not accept the popular voting in their states to award Electors, forcing the College to cancel and pass it all to a GOP-bent House.

Thing is, the Electoral-Vote blogger thought of that as well:

An even bigger problem is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966). While that one was specifically about poll taxes, it also established the broad principle that once the right of people to vote has been extended, the state cannot intervene to dilute the potency of that vote. Taken together, what Bush and Harper suggest is that a state might be on firm ground if they announce on, say, Jan. 1, 2020, that "this year, the state legislature is just going to award our EVs." However, once states allow people to cast actual ballots, that method for awarding EVs is locked in and cannot be altered...

It had happened before, by the way: In 1860, South Carolina didn't host a popular vote, their legislature went and awarded their results to the pro-Slavery Democratic candidate (Beckinridge). This time, it's too late: Any GOP state that's watching the polls swing to Biden (hi, Florida!) right now in August cannot cancel the vote and nominate the Electors. They can do everything else - suppress votes, rig machines, undercount results - but they still run the risk that the popular vote won't go their way.

Which is partly why they're waiting on Barr to release "reports" of mail-in ballots being "rigged" in order to justify negating the popular vote results... but THAT all depends on if the difference in results relies on the mail-ins counting or not (if Biden wins by a wide margin without mail-ins, forget it: Barr would have to argue a way to negate the WHOLE thing, which even conservative courts would choke on).

This is the point where headaches start forming, and the stress of paranoia/despair kicks in. The solutions rely on a lot of things outside of control at our (yours and mine) level. The Democratic Party has to be ready to call on a legion of lawyers across every state to fight Barr's likely meddling in any and every possibility.

The one thing WE can do at our level is turnout the vote. THAT'S the math we can control. As long as the turnout FOR Biden and the Democrats is high enough, the Republicans can't rig a damn thing. They'll yell and scream, they'll present bad evidence to argue their side, but if Biden is winning places by double-digits in enough states and at percentages close to polling, the Republicans will have a hard time arguing rigged results... and they run the risk at state levels of alienating enough residents to diminish state-level control by the 2022 midterms, if not outright street protests by an outraged majority that will never stop (hi, Belarus!).

Democrats need to ensure enough of their numbers are registered and ready to vote, confirmed to vote for Biden against a corrupt trump that is one step away from tinpot dictator status that haunts all the failed Republics we've seen over the decades.

Elections matter, Americans. Voter turnout matters, Democrats. Come hell or high water or COVID or police crackdowns, every one of us opposed to trump's misrule, every one of us opposed to McConnell's obstructionist destruction, we have to do the math and vote and make it count and make the Republicans answer for their cheating, corrupt ways.

But the Suburbs Have No Charms to Soothe

Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth

- "Subdivisions" Rush

Okay, to be honest, this quick little rant about donald "Fearmongering Shitgibbon" trump trying to scare White Suburbanites into fleeing from Biden and Democrats is mostly so I can quote from a song I grew up to since the 1980s.

Which is kind of a thing for me, being a Generation Xer who grew up in the suburbs, in the north Pinellas County region of Tampa Bay Florida where I literally watched entire neighborhoods spring up from the paved remnants of orange groves and dirt hills. Florida's population boom of the Eighties? I was there, and it was all 3-4 bedrooms houses with manicured lawns and pink (excuse me, that color is CORAL, thank you very much) painted exteriors.

So if anything I speak from experience. So with this, I question trump's attempt to appeal to what he called the Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

He's attempting to appeal to those who, when the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s gave Blacks more political freedom (but not economic equality), fled from places due to be desegregated - cities - outward to planned and deed-restricted neighborhoods where the obsessions over property values would encourage segregation in ways that couldn't be called out. It was called White Flight and you shouldn't be surprised to meet a lot of White folk who won't talk about it or claim it never happened that way. (Ask White folk about Redlining and watch their heads explode)

trump's appeal is based on the view of the suburbs being traditionally White Conservative enclaves, home to thousands of middle-class workers who habitually vote in favor of the world of Ronald Reagan's Eagleland, a place where people work hard play hard obey the traffic laws and worship an Evangelical-approved Deity every Sunday.

There's a problem with that image of Suburbia. It's a little out of date.

A lot has changed since the 1980s. The economic makeup of suburban communities have shifted away from the Blue Collar manufacturing conservatism that made up the neighborhoods from the Sixties through the Eighties. If anything - and from what I've seen - the suburbs has seen a rise in White Collar professionals - due to the loss of manufacturing jobs since the Seventies - made up of technology, health care, education, office-oriented work forces... which have more diverse and more educated demographics.

The racial shift of the suburbs has also taken place since the Nineties. Hispanic population growth in various states - not just in the South - has filled in a void where White residents kept fleeing from encroaching metropolitan politics. Another element has been "Black Flight" where the rise of educated White Collar workers in that demographic allowed them to flee cities much the way Whites fled decades earlier. (Yeah, we uh don't talk about that either, except for the part where hip young White couples are moving back into the cities to gentrify everything... ugh another Starbucks?)

As a result, it's not that the suburbs are now White enclaves... it's that the suburbs are now White Collar enclaves, filled with professional-level, college-educated home owners of varying ethnicity. And all of them eager to enforce that NO SOLICITING sign in front of the main entrance to their walled-off subdivisions.

We're talking teachers, doctors and nurses, computer/technology workers, lawyers, public service (city/county) employees, financial experts, store managers, warehouse supervisors, anything that requires a 4-year degree minimum. All of them living the Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Supposedly.

Because there's also another thing that trump is overlooking about the suburbs: Those neighborhoods are getting hit HARD during trump's own regime, especially in trump's failure to handle the Conoravirus pandemic. I just listed the professions above, nearly every one of them affected negatively - especially those in the medical/health care fields - by trump's continued inability to answer the challenges of leadership needed to keep the nation quarantined and reducing the risks of infection. As a result, it's also affecting those professionals in businesses and workplaces that are being forced to exposure, especially the teachers and educators facing the risks of COVID exposure at school.

As a result, I am not imaging a high number of suburbanites who view trump with any level of favorability or support. trump had been bleeding off suburban types throughout his tenure, especially among women, but lately that leak has turned into a gusher. And the polls are backing me up on this.

trump can't appeal to a broad range of educated, ethnically-diverse Americans. he's been too busy appealing to racist Whites to keep his voting base happy.

and trump can't comprehend how his ineptitude and failures have turned the Suburban Lifestyle Dream into a nightmare. Which is why he's going to make things worse for American suburbanites.

For the LOVE OF GOD, Suburban America, wake up and vote trump out.

 

Anyone Remember The Year 2010 And How It Seemed So Crazy Then

I am suddenly nostalgic and in the mood to look back ten years to 2010 and try to remember what the hell the world looked like back then.

Back then this was under a completely different name - Amendments We Need - and the blog's focus was supposed to be on political reforms and high-minded philosophizing. But even then the postings were sliding into weekly (and then daily) words of outrage over the partisan nightmare the Republicans were creating during the Obama years, so I changed it (and busted a lot of links to earlier articles in the process, sigh).

I realize looking back the amount of writing (85) was minimal compared to recent years where I break 100 easily, although the years 2015 (205) and 2016 (307) are outside the norms. Back then I was still finding a voice, and coping with a lot of bad stuff in the Real World.

2010 was the middle of my lost years, between late 2008 when I lost my full-time job as a librarian before regaining a new librarian post in early 2013. Roughly four-plus years of career searching, thanks to the Great Recession that killed off the civil service job market: A lot of city, county, and state revenues relied on property taxes, and the collapsed housing market cut into those revenues well up to now.

Best I could find were part-time jobs, inventory checking here, temp Census taking there, unable to hold either for long while I kept hunting anything in editing (Journalism), research (Libraries), or tech (Computer skills, and studying for A+ certification on a job-hunting grant).

In terms of what I was writing on the blog, it bounced between the serious endeavors - lamenting the failures of mainstream media and such - and the quick posts - thus and so - in order to keep myself engaged with writing while the real world was bumming me out.

Man I was pretty depressed back then (and sadly that depression is chronic and not far from my mind)

I notice I was linking a lot to Glenn Greenwald back then... and that faded away in favor of Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic as well as the general team of misfits at Balloon Juice, upon which a lot of my current blogging is based. I also started linking to David Frum and Conor Friedersdorf as kinds of counter-balance of conservative viewpoints, because I try to accept the larger scope of things (even as I got to find conservative viewpoints skewing further to a vicious extreme).

I was also taunting Erik Erickson often because the SOB threatened to shoot census workers at a time I was enumerating. Grrr.

If there were any personal bright spots, my brother Phil took me to a Rays game that ended up the team's first No-Hitter. WOOHOO!

Looking back, I'm finding something that had me looking forward: I wrote an article "Daddy What Did YOU Do During the Republican War on America" projecting all the way up to the far-flung year of 2020 (oh, hi). Oh good God, re-reading this article is breaking my heart. Not just the fanciful idea that I'd actually be married with kids by now (looks forlornly across an empty house as a Florida thunderstorm rages outside), but that ten years ago some form of sanity would prevail. That somehow, the crazed Tea Party efforts by the Far Right - the media, the GOP Congresscritters, the Birthers that would metastasize into QAnon nuts six years later - would implode on itself, that enough Americans would rise up against the tax-cut obsessions and racist/sexist bullshit.

Now I know why I was looking back now. Why I'm in such a mood. Part of me remembered this, remembered the hope I had for brighter happier days in the 2010 decade. All to see it come crashing down thanks to Mitch and trump and 62 million insane neighbors.

That was 2010, ten years gone.

Are we going to let 2020 ruin everything between now and 2030?

Are we even going to see 2030?

There Is Only One Safe Place In America Right Now: Home

We are eight months into 2020 and we are still coping with a Coronavirus pandemic that shows no sign of slowing, all because our national political leadership remains unfocused on fighting it to the point where trump and his handlers behave like it's still not real.

The scary thing is we are closing in on the traditional start of our national education system returning from summer breaks, where classrooms open in August through December for Christmas/New Years holidays. trump is insisting the schools open. Coronavirus is telling us differently (via Adrianne LeFrance at The Atlantic):

“This push to open schools is guaranteed to fail,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and molecular virologist, and the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. I’ve been corresponding with Hotez, and with several epidemiologists, over the course of the pandemic, and have noticed a starkness in their views in recent weeks. “The social-distancing expectations and mask requirements for the lower grades are unrealistic,” Hotez told me. “In communities with high transmission, it’s inevitable that COVID-19 will enter the schools. Within two weeks of opening schools in communities with high virus transmission, teachers will become ill. All it will take is for a single teacher to become hospitalized with COVID and everything will shut down.”

Hotez has good reason to be pessimistic. There were 68,605 new cases in the United States yesterday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The seven-day average has stayed above 60,000 new cases per day since July 13. Reaching 100,000 cases per day, once seen as an apocalyptic, worst-case-scenario warning from Anthony Fauci, is no longer difficult to imagine. Indeed, my conversations with epidemiologists in recent days were all strikingly dark. They agreed: Schools should not risk reopening, probably not even for the youngest children, in the coming weeks. “We can’t pretend like everything’s fine,” said Gary Simon, the director of the infectious diseases division at George Washington University. “If I had a school-age kid, I wouldn’t want to send him to school.”

The evidence is all around us. There is the summer camp in Georgia where hundreds of kids and counselors—nearly half the camp—got infected after only a few days together. Then there’s the school in Indiana where, just hours after reopening last week, a student tested positive for the coronavirus. (“We knew it was a when, not if,” the superintendent told The New York Times, but officials were “very shocked it was on Day 1.”)

We had months to prepare, ever since the official shutdown in March. We needed extensive testing in place, enough labs to generate results in days so we could quarantine fast enough. We needed more hospital beds and supplies, overflow facilities to handle the waves of infected we're still trying to heal. We needed to plan for home child care, providing workplaces the means to redirect work from office to home so parents could keep an eye on their families. We needed the funding to set up virtual schooling, mobile WiFi hotspots to families in rural areas, free Internet to suburbs and cities, and loaner laptops so that kids could get classes and submit work to and from home, where they'd be safe.

None of that happened. The scope and size of such endeavors can't be done state by state. It had to be done at the federal level. Yet trump and his Republican allies in the Senate are DOING NOTHING except give orders to the states and to school systems that can't even begin to solve the problems they're being told to fix. Back to LeFrance:

“The problem is the White House and the task force could never organize themselves to lead a federal response and bring virus transmission down to containment levels,” said Hotez, who has argued for the necessity of a federal containment plan that, if executed effectively, might allow the nation to reopen comprehensively as soon as October. “Instead they took a lazy and careless route, claiming schools are important, as we all know, and the teachers and principals need to figure it out. What they did was deliberately set up the teachers, staff, and parents to fail. It’s one of the most careless, incompetent, and heartless actions I’ve ever seen promoted by the executive branch of the federal government.”

All of this disaster gets laid at the feet of the trump family. Like every other crisis, trump handed this off to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who proceeded like all his previous endeavors to mismanage the situation to where we're screwed now. As pointed out in this article in Vanity Fair by Katherine Eban:

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control...

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

In a statement, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “The premise of this article is completely false...”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said...
On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states...

We saw the results of that: A number of Republican-controlled states - Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona above all - decided to push for quick re-openings, acting as though COVID was under control when it was merely waiting for super-spreader events to cause a second wave. Those Red states - no longer the Blue states (save California) - are now the hot spots threatening our citizenry to the detriment of REPUBLICAN governors who are now the ones to blame.

The means to track and isolate carriers through testing fell apart: Not enough funding and help from the federal level where it had usually been. We're at a point where people are waiting more than 7 days for results... during which time they're infecting everyone else as asymptomatic victims of the Coronavirus.

In the meanwhile, trump's Far Right fan base and media allies pushed against EVERY tool of combating the pandemic as though the fight itself offended their "freedoms", especially waging a war against mask-wearing in public places even though months of evidence demonstrated here and elsewhere that masks reduce the spread of COVID. Unless trump himself comes out and repudiates his earlier stances, we are not going to see an end to that fearmongering over masks (it may already be too late if trump tries).

There are no good solutions except the hard choice of going back to Shut Down like we did in March. The hard choice for the U.S. Senate - which is FAILING to pass much-needed extensions of financial aid to the unemployed and renters in dire need of paychecks - to continue federal support that most conservatives despise. These hard choices may be unpalatable to the Far Right... but without those decisions, we are facing both an expansion of a lethal pandemic killing more Americans and a worsening economic situation that can't repair itself without yet another massive bailout.

First things first, Americans.

Keep our kids and families safe as possible. Keep them home. Give them the tools to study in safe places and learn as best they can without the exposure to death they'll be facing in the close quarters of classrooms.

Stay At Home, America.

Stay Safe.

Hell No, trump

So trump dropped a tweet or three this morning, in the middle of a thousand other things happening, where he expressed his interest in suspending the 2020 General (and Presidential) Elections. The excuse was concern over the possibility of "ballot-by-mail fraud" (which still hasn't been proven in court) and the pandemic (which was trump's own damn fault letting it get out of control).

It prompted a day-long Twitter Trend of HELL NO, and brought a lot of angry people to bear worried that trump was now at full dictator mode.

To quote Ian Millhiser at Vox: trump can't do it if he tried.

A trio of federal laws set Election Day for presidential electors, senators, and US representatives as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” If Republicans want to change this law, they would need to go through the Democratic House.

The 20th Amendment, moreover, provides that “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” Thus, even if the election were somehow canceled, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s terms would still expire as scheduled — although, as explained below, the question of who would succeed them is devilishly complicated...

trump could try to argue that his emergency powers would override the existing laws, but there's no way he can argue past something written in stone the way the 20th Amendment is. Supreme Court justices, even trumpian Far Right ones, do not take kindly to that kind of scam. And Chief Roberts has already expressed his disdain with trump's legal shenanigans. Back to Millhiser:

Under the 20th Amendment, “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d [sic] day of January.” So, if no one is elected to replace these officials, Trump and Pence cease to be elected officials the minute their terms expire on January 20. Members of the House serve two-year terms, so all members of the House will cease to be representatives on January 3; one-third of senators’ terms also expire on that date.

Ordinarily, if the Presidency and Vice Presidency are both vacant at the same time, the office falls to the Speaker of the House. But if there is no election, there will be no Speaker when Trump and Pence’s terms expire because all House seats will become vacant on January 3...

I've seen other arguments online that there's a possibility that Nancy Pelosi, the current serving Speaker, might still qualify under the 25th Amendment because the Speakership still belongs to her. The rules of the House are that she remains so unless voted out from office (which technically did not happen, there just wasn't a vote period), if majority control flipped to another party (which hadn't happened, due to no vote), if she was voted out by a No-Confidence motion (which is rare, and does not apply to this), or if she resigned. Technically, anybody could be voted as Speaker even if they were not elected to the House at all (which did come up during the struggle to find a replacement for Boehner when he retired), so Pelosi as sitting Speaker could remain so if the election was suspended.

But to continue Millhiser's reasoning:

If there is no President, Vice president, or Speaker, the next official in line is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a largely ceremonial position that is traditionally held by the most senior member of the majority party. Right now that is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

But wait! Recall that the terms of many senators also expire on January 3. As it turns out, 23 seats held by Republicans and only 12 seats held by Democrats are up for election this year, so if no election is held, Democrats will have a majority in the Senate once these seats become vacant. Which would mean that Senate Democrats would be able to choose a new President pro tempore. If they follow the tradition of choosing the most senior member of their caucus, that would place Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) next in line for the presidency.

Things actually get even more complicated from here. The 17th Amendment permits state governors to name temporary senators to vacant seats, but not all states allow their governors to do so. It’s also not immediately clear who would be the governor of many states if no election takes place in 2020, because much of the line of succession in those states could be rendered vacant as well...

Personally, if it works out that Pat Leahy ends up as President through all this, I'd be happy because it'd mean we'd get a President who personally stared down the Joker.

It's a pretty thought experiment to try, but the reality is trump can't stop this election cycle: It is hardwired into our system. Not just in the law but by tradition: We held a Presidential election in the middle of a Civil War, for God's sake. he'd have to order a straight-up military coup into the states to shut down the local election setups, especially in the Blue states that won't obey any suspension order he gives.

But that's not trump's true intention here. trump know how to play a long con, and he's setting the groundwork to invalidate the election after it happens. Per David A. Graham at The Atlantic:

Trump has repeatedly and falsely alleged that the election will be tainted by widespread fraud due to increased use of mail-in voting stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. (He has also repeatedly and falsely claimed major fraud in the 2016 election, which he won.) While voting by mail, like all methods, is susceptible to fraud, no evidence suggests widespread fraud that could affect the result of the election...

However, there are legitimate worries about the ability of many Americans to properly and safely vote, and many reasons to fear that the November election will be a train wreck. COVID-19-related complications, including a huge increase in demand for voting by mail and a shortage of polling places and poll workers, threaten to swamp already struggling local election systems. Election experts worry that final election results will not be available for weeks after Election Day, as votes are slowly counted. Any delay in the day of the election would only exacerbate this problem by making it even harder to meet other deadlines. Also under statute, the Electoral College must meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. According to the Constitution, the new presidential term starts at noon on January 20 of the following year...

trump is setting up now his ability to throw a wrench into that process, delaying things through court challenges at every mail-in ballot against him that nothing can get counted in time and force the Electoral College to not even vote. That would send the whole mess into the US House where by a quirk of the election rules each state (50) gets ONE vote (not proportioned out to each Representative), with the majority of each state dominating their single vote (there are 26 controlled by Republicans, one split, 23 controlled by Democrats). It wouldn't matter if Democrats have 230-plus Representatives: It would only matter that Republicans control 26 state delegations. The only way this doesn't work to the Republicans' advantage is if Democrats flip delegation control of three states, but there's no guarantee of that despite the signs of a Blue Wave in congressional elections.

This could happen even if Joe Biden secures both the popular vote (which is likely) and the Electoral vote (which would involve flipping back three to five - even six if Texas goes Blue (!) - states that went barely for trump). Just imagine it: Biden wins 374 EV by securing all the 2012 Blue states plus Arizona and North Carolina and maybe one more, and does so with 70 million voters to trump's 61 million with a nice 53 percent popular count. Yet trump and his Republican cronies still in control of Florida, Ohio, Arizona and Wisconsin contest the votes forcing a delay similar to what happened in 1876, compelling the system to toss it all to a US House where Republicans hold 26 delegations.

It'd be a huge risk to piss off 70 million Americans, but like any political party relying on Minority Rule, the Republicans right now do not give a fuck about the Majority.

Back to Graham:

Trump’s unpopularity is one of the peculiarities of his proposal to delay the election. There aren’t many historical precedents for such a move, but when they exist, they have been undertaken by politicians who are extremely well liked... 

Such leaders could argue that their constituents needed and wanted continuity. Trump, by contrast, is a widely reviled politician. Most of the country feels that things are on the wrong track, and he knows it. This is, in fact, the likely motivation behind this proposal. It’s more a means of preemptively contesting the outcome of an election he fears he will lose than trying to actually move it...

If Trump loses the election in November and wants to argue that he was cheated and the voting was not legitimate, he can’t start on November 4. He needs to lay the groundwork ahead of time—for example, by repeatedly warning that the vote will be fraudulent and rigged, and by telling his supporters that he tried to postpone it but was denied by “Them.”

Some observers have focused on the question of whether a defeated Trump would actually leave office, as required by law, or stage some sort of coup. That still seems tough to envision, though the president’s complete disregard for the rule of law makes it hard to rule anything out. But a concerted effort to undermine the election, and to convince 35 to 45 percent of the electorate that the balloting was never fair, would do its own damage...

Either trump wins by cheating, or he wins by burning everything in his wake as he scurries out the White House door. It's both bluff - to cower us to behave - and threat - making sure his violent obsessive MAGA fans riot over his loss even if Biden tops him with 55 percent of the popular vote and a solid Electoral win.

We are too far into a disastrous trump regime to cower in fear. We've had 232 years of this nation to build our resolve and our faith in the United States to let this tiny, whining Shitgibbon get the better of us.

Vote however you can. Vote by mail even as trump destroys our Postal Service. Vote in person using every safety and health precaution you've got. Overwhelm trump's diminishing support. Overwhelm every Republican attempt to suppress our votes.

Make it so the turnout is so lopsided in favor to the Democratic Party that the state-level Republicans won't risk playing trump's con game to delay the counts.

Make it so the Majority - the TRUE Majority of Americans who want normalcy again, who want a working federal government again - finally gets their say after decades of abuse by a Republican Party that no longer represents us.

Don't play trump's game. Beat him at ours.

Hell No, trump.

Living a Different Life In the Pandemic

Things I've missed during this COVID-19 pandemic:

I've missed going to the movie theater to watch first-run summer blockbuster movies, superhero movies, comedies that won't make me cringe (those are rare anymore), anything that looks good by Pixar, those sort of things. I have streaming at home like Disney Plus, thanks to a Christmas present last year, but the experience of the large theater, the decent-sized crowds oohing and aahing and cheering and laughing... I miss that.

I've missed browsing the bookstore. Yes, I work in a library, but it doesn't hurt me to go checking out all the other books and magazines the library can't carry (we ARE running on a city/county budget, people).

I've missed the occasional road trip to where my friends are, the ones I grew up with in high school and some I've made in my time living around the Tampa Bay area. I miss driving out to the Pinellas beaches. I miss revisiting Tarpon Springs, finding a gyro place to eat (sorry but Plaka's closed). I miss visiting any beach overall, it's been years since I went and just sat and enjoyed the view, the overwhelmed senses of watching and feeling and smelling sand and water and sky (no tasting though).

I've missed the chance to travel this summer, nothing major like I hope to someday - I desire a visit to Vegas and the Grand Canyon, I desire a trip to Ireland, I desire a trip to Prague, I desire a trip to Japan - but still a chance to go somewhere scenic and spiritual and fun (no, not Disney. Well, okay, MAYBE Galaxy's Edge). I did have plans to visit the Ta-Nehisi crowd this September, but that's on hold as well. Sigh.

I'm missing the weekend jaunts I take to places where I can sit and write, away from the distractions of home.

There are other regrets, but right now these are the things I know are missing in my life.

I have to accept this, because the risks of COVID are too great to ignore at my peril and everyone else's.

Perhaps another time, when a vaccine is confirmed, when life can return to a semblance of normalcy.

Perhaps...

Quick Update on Jacksonville, trump, and the Reality of an Out-Of-Control Pandemic

(Update 7/26/20: Thank you again Batocchio for linking me to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this weekend! I want to mention here that this blog just received a Finalist recognition from the Florida Writers Association for the article "Seven Reasons NOT To Invade Iran" and hopefully we'll see where things go from there... )

trump, unhappy that North Carolina and Charlotte was telling him he couldn't have a big shindig for a convention this year due to trump's own mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, tried to move the big part of the show - his speech - to Jacksonville Florida where he thought the rules would be more relaxed and the locals more accommodating.

Today, he finally accepted the warnings of Jacksonville officials and likely his own medical experts that hosting a large gathering even outdoors was a bad idea, and canceled the big ego-boosting show. To quote Steve Contorno and Kirby Wilson via the Tampa Bay Times:

The news came as a surprise to several Florida Republicans close to the event and the president. U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s closet allies in Congress, said he didn’t know Trump had made this call. Nor did state Sen. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida who helped bring the event to the Sunshine State.

It may have been a surprise to the Florida Republicans, but it wasn't exactly so for the number of party leaders who were begging off from attending because even they didn't want to risk their health. Back to the article:

It was only six weeks ago that Trump stripped the convention from Charlotte, the previous host city, after clashing with Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper over what the president then deemed to be overly demanding restrictions related to the coronavirus. Trump and the Republican Party then settled on Jacksonville, in part because Florida was swiftly reopening the economy amid falling coronavirus cases.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry enthusiastically welcomed the event. Curry celebrated the announcement with a flashy video and promises of a post-coronavirus economic boom for his city. However, the reality on the ground dramatically shifted. Florida subsequently emerged as the new national hot spot...

Partly because the risks of exposure actually goes back up when you re-open too quick, and mostly because trump and the Republicans didn't effing care even back then. Back:

More recently, organizers said they would shift to a more scaled-down convention with smaller crowds. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced last week that just delegates, a single guest per delegate and alternate delegates would be permitted to attend the president’s nomination speech on the final evening of the convention. Speeches set for earlier in the convention were restricted to the party’s roughly 2,500 delegates only...

The final nail arrived this week when Duval County Sheriff Mike Williams suggested he didn’t have enough details to provide adequate security to keep attendees and Jacksonville residents safe. Still, even with COVID-19 deaths registering in the triple digits and his local sheriff no longer on board, Curry still remained that the show would go on...

What will happen now is pretty much what everyone else in the nation is doing: Hosting it all on Zoom chats. Given how disorganized this entire circus turned out to be, I'm willing to bet even trump will screw that up.

On the bright side, Jacksonville doesn't have to face the prospect of a super-spreader event hitting them the way trump's Tulsa rally did. On the downside, we're still coping with an ever-upward spike of positive cases and deaths here in Florida.

That part of trump's shitshow hasn't ended yet. /headdesk

There's Something Happening In Portland

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down 
- "For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield

What trump is doing in Portland Oregon should terrify you. Via Trevor Timm at The Guardian:

A remarkable and nightmarish scene playing out in Portland should terrify anyone who cares about the US Constitution: unmarked vans full of camouflaged and unidentified federal agents are pulling up next to protesters on street corners, then snatching and arresting them with no explanation.

If this were happening in Venezuela or Iran, the US government would be threatening international sanctions. Since it’s happening in the US, Trump’s acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary is defending the decision and even promising more.

The stories from witnesses and those who have been picked up by the unmarked vans – apparently being operated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which is under DHS’s control – are downright terrifying. One victim told the New York Times: “One of the officers said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ and just grabbed me and threw me into the van. Another officer pulled my beanie down, so I couldn’t see...”

Most of the earlier stories from the abducted had them shoved into vans, dragged through one or federal buildings, and then let go as though they were training runs. Later stories are more frightening with people grabbed off streets, bound as though arrested, warned they were being charged usually for things they weren't even doing, forced to sit in cramped conditions with many of them coping with beatings and bleedings, and then let go. The obvious next stage is actually keeping the abducted held on "charged" without even a chance of speaking to lawyers or loved ones.

I may be an amateur with the law, but I have a basic enough understanding to know that a lot of this violates core principles like Habeas Corpus, the Sixth Amendment guarantee to legal counsel, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee to due process, and the general idea that police brutality is a goddamned no-no (it's why the protesters are out there in the first place).

And the acting DHS, Chad Wolf (seriously? I guess Roy Stalin was already taken) under the claim of "increasing mob violence" in other major cities is threatening to spread these unbadged - and turning out via reports they are untrained at crowd control - thugs to enforce trump's vision of a cowed and quiet population.

Comparisons to Nazi Germany Gestapo have been rampant.

It is doing nothing to clamp down on the protests in Portland, by the by. Mothers are now placing themselves in harm's way to keep the DHS thugs away from everyone else (although the thugs are now firing on the women as well).

But this is trump, struggling to invoke fear in the voters so he can cheat his way to a November re-election, needing violence in the streets to make the middle class Whites terrified of the chaos. The kind of fear that stirred reactions in 1968 leading to Nixon's win.

But this is also trump, losing the suburbs over his screwups handling the pandemic, and there's no evidence that the middle class Whites are going to buy what trump is selling: The suburbs are supporting the protests against police brutality.

And this is us, the United States facing a new threat from trump's regime, one that had been focused on hurting Latino and Asian immigrants and hurting Muslims and hurting Blacks now looking to hurt more Americans.

It won't just be Portland or Chicago. It's going to be Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and Manhattan, and Boston, and Miami, and Orlando, and New Orleans, and Houston, and anywhere else trump is desperate to impose fear and suppress opposition.

He dare not win. trump's cronies dare not win.

Stand up, America.

Navy veteran Chris David stood up. The thugs hurt him. But he stood. They withered. We can stand too.